the 2024-2025 opera and ballet season
The season opens on November 8 with the most popular and cinematic of Verdi’s titles, La Traviata, in the new staging for Verdi by the French director Arnoud Bernard, known for his ability to make intriguing reinterpretations while always remaining within a framework of impeccable classicism. On the podium the Permanent Musical Director Enrico Calesso, who tackled the title for the first time in 2018 at the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino and since then has made it one of his strong points on the many European stages where he regularly conducts. The cast is led by an absolutely experienced Violetta, the forty-eight-year-old Neapolitan Maria Grazia Schiavo, a reference voice for conductors such as Muti and Dantone and an important presence on the best stages, from Salzburg to La Scala. With her the young Alfredo by Antonio Poli, one of the most esteemed tenors of the new generation.
In December right away the ballet Don Quixotewhich confirms the now stable artistic and creative relationship with nearby Lubljana, a small Slovenian Salzburg on the outskirts of Trieste, a lively center of music and dance led by the Veronese choreographer Renato Zanella, who this year will bring the famous nineteenth-century title of Ludwig to Trieste Minkus on libretto and choreography by Marius Petipa with Alexander Gorky’s 1900 modifications, for a timeless dance classic approached with philological rigor and all the freshness of the Lubljana ballet.
The new year will instead open in January with The abduction from the Seraglio by Mozart in the new production by the director, set designer and costume designer Ivan Stefanutti with the return to the podium, again on a Mozartian title, of Beatrice Venezi, the Konstanze of the beautiful and young Russian soprano Anna Aglatova, still to be discovered by the Italian public, and the Belmonte of Ruzil Gatin, a Russian tenor already well present in our country, from the Rossini Opera Festival to La Scala. This month Trieste and its theatre will also take the opportunity to host, in collaboration with PromoTurismoFVG and the Municipality of Trieste, the annual meeting of ICMA, that is, the association that brings together the most important European classical music magazines, thus becoming for a few days a true capital of the musical debate of the continent.
In February we will continue with Puccini triptych Tabarro, Suor Angelica and Gianni Schicchi in the new, first staging in collaboration with the Teatro Comunale of Bologna as part of a fresh synergy between two of the most important historical foundations in Italy and which will continue already this year in June with Bernstein’s Candide. The solid Pier Francesco Maestrini is directing and on the podium is Ivan Ciampa, one of the most successful conductors at an international level for the Italian opera repertoire. The cast, obviously very large, sees important voices such as the Russian Roman Burdenko, already well appreciated in the city, Anastasia Bartoli, among the most interesting emerging sopranos of her generation, the young Triestine Riccardo Rados and the established Russian soprano Olga Maslova, already loved in the last Nabucco.
March, however, will finally celebrate Wagner’s return to Trieste to strengthen one of the most identifying musical traditions for the Julian city since the end of the nineteenth century, which in recent years instead seemed relegated to decor historical in the halls of the Schmidl Theatre Museum: The Flying Dutchman with the new direction of the German Henning Brockhaus, now at home at Verdi and a true backbone of twentieth-century European theatrical creativity from Strehler onwards, and the direction of Enrico Calesso, one of the best Wagnerian interpreters in the German area, making his debut in the title . The cast brings together four Wagnerian singers with very solid experience: in the role of Der Holländer the bass baritone James Rutherford, Erik will be played by the American tenor Clay Hilley, the dramatic soprano Elena Batoukova-Kerl will be Senta and the German bass baritone Albert Dolmen in the role of Daland . In April Lucia of Lammermoor of Donizetti will continue its journey with the illustrious Bergamasco, revived in the city last season, thanks to the sumptuous staging of the Las Palmas Opera directed by the German-Polish director Bruno Berger-Gorski, while the beloved Daniel Oren will return to the podium of the Verdi Orchestra and in the title role the absolute diva of Bel Canto Jessica Pratt in her debut in Trieste. Oren again in May for the Rigoletto in the new production by Verdi with Amartuvshin Enkhbat in the title role, an absolute guarantee of excellence after the brilliant and highly praised debut at Scala for the long-awaited return of the opera to the Scaliger stage, with him a young international cast that will certainly reserve beautiful surprises.
Finally, a great twentieth-century closure in June with the Candide by Leonard Bernstein, with the debut as an opera director of Renato Zanella, known until now only as one of the most brilliant ballet choreographers in Europe, from the Vienna Opera to the Verona Arena and a well-known personality in the city for his effervescent creativity. On the podium the established director Kevin Rhodes, who will certainly know how to give the right touch to this rare two-act operetta composed by Bernstein precisely in the years in which, to all intents and purposes, Trieste lived under the Anglo-American protectorate, a true enclave of Anglo-Saxon culture on Italian soil.
in-depth analysis
Scala, Verdi’s La Forza del Destino opens the 2024/2025 season
the 2024 symphony season
After the capsule within the New Festival of Trieste with Giovanni Sollima in the double role of cello soloist and director, Rachmaninov and Dvorak with Will Humburg on the podium and Nikolai Lugansky on the piano, for the two events in collaboration with Società dei Concerti, Friday 27 September we will enter the heart of the actual symphony season with a first appointment of great interest and originality, dedicated in fact to the rediscovery and recreation of folk music in a cultured key of the European nineteenth century with the rare Spanish Symphony for violin and orchestra by Édouard-Victor-Antoine Lalo ei Paintings at an exhibition by Musorgsky in the orchestral transcription by Maurice Ravel. On the podium the great experience of the Austrian conductor Hans Graf and on the violin the excellent virtuoso Sergej Krylov.
A more classical composition between Brahms and Schumann will follow on October 5th with the return of the young and brilliant Ettore Pagano on the cello, of the great Serbian violinist Stefan Milenkovich with the baton of the eighty-one year old German conductor Hartmut Haenchen, a true master of the great transalpine school and guardian of its most solid musical tradition.
So on October 11th a first truly precious layout in its undoubted originality, opened by the Five Fragments of Sappho – Twentieth-Century Greek Lyrics by Luigi Dalla Piccola, historical testimony of the interest and rediscovery of ancient metrics by the composers of the last century, then the even rarer Turin Sandro Fuga with the Concerto for Piano, strings and timpani, an author who also received an award in the city at the “Città di Trieste” Symphonic Composition Competition in 1952; finally Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms, a masterpiece that opens his fortunate period defined as ‘neoclassical’. On the podium for the occasion the young Neapolitan conductor, now adopted by the best orchestras in the Germanic area, Tommaso Turchetta, on stage the voice of the established soprano Marie Pierre Roy, known for her great confidence in the baroque and contemporary repertoire, therefore the pianist Giacomo Fuga, son of the composer Sandro Fuga and therefore the interpreter par excellence of his father’s composition.
Then between October and November there will be a double appointment with the Musical Director Enrico Calesso: on October 18 with the Tristan-Vorspiel und Isoldes Liebestod from the opera Tristan und Isolde by Richard Wagner, then the Concerto for violin and orchestra by Ferruccio Busoni in the centenary of the illustrious citizen of Julian with the violinist and Paganini Prize winner Giuseppe Gibboni, finally the two symphonic poems by Richard Strauss, Don Juan and Tod und Verklärung; on Saturday November 23 instead the little performed concerto for oboe also by R. Strauss and the seventh symphony by Bruckner.
Finally, a great Puccini closing on December 22nd with Maestro Jordi Bernacer on the podium for the rare Mass for four voices and orchestra or Messa di Gloria, an early work by the great man from Lucca and his last foray into the sacred repertoire as a family legacy as the last exponent of five generations of organists of the cathedral of San Martino, maestros of the Cappella di Palazzo, teachers of the Musical Institute and authors of operas and sacred music. A text, long forgotten and rediscovered only in 1952, which will surely intrigue Puccini lovers also for the many implications linked to his obscure youth, as well as for the wide openings on what was, shortly thereafter, his most famous musical destiny.
